PORTSMOUTH — Ever wonder what life was like in Portsmouth in the early part of the 20th century?

Abby A. Sherman (1857-1933) doesn’t have her own Wikipedia page, and she’s not even a household name among most residents of this tiny town. From 1898 to 1932, however, she was a meticulous chronicler of the daily happenings in our fair town, as well as what was going on in the world around her.

“Her life was very full as we can easily see from her diaries. It’s a great summary of Portsmouth’s history from that period,” said Town Historian Jim Garman, who lectured on Sherman’s writings at the Portsmouth Free Public Library July 18. “This abstraction from her diaries is an attempt to show life in the town of Portsmouth through her eyes. It is not objective history; it is a personal memoir.”

The location of the lecture was fitting, as Sherman chronicled the birth of the library in some of her first diary entries from 1898, when she was 41. “This building was built in 1898 — the heart of it,” said Garman, who lectured about the library’s history back in March.

Sherman was the wife of Benjamin C. Sherman (1851-1922), a farmer with ties to the very first settlers of Portsmouth in 1638. Their farm was on the east side of Quaker Hill and ran down to the Sakonnet River, while the family home was on the west side of East Main Road, Garman said. They had three sons, one of whom was Arthur Sherman. He was a state senator before serving as Portsmouth’s town clerk for more than three decades.

“Her occupation was ‘at home,’” said Garman, noting that Sherman had a busy family and social life and recorded activities of relatives and friends as well as news events both locally and nationally. “She was well tuned-in. During that period, a lot of things happened. She refers to Lizzie Borden, to the Titanic, to the women’s right to vote.”

On the latter topic, Sherman — a diehard Republican all her life — was especially passionate. Congress passed the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which granted women the right to vote, on June 4, 1919, and the law was ratified on Aug. 18, 1920.

“At 1 o’clock I went down to the Town Hall and registered,” she wrote in her entry for June 8, 1920. “Now I am a voter or shall be after I vote, who knows but what I might be president of the United States.” She was 60 years old at the time.

A few months later, an even more enthusiastic diary entry was recorded. Nov. 2, 1920: “Today we cast our first ballot. The women of Portsmouth. It was the greatest event of our lives. The men all said it was the best town meeting that we ever had. Arthur was reelected,” she said, referring to her son who earned another term in the R.I. Senate.

“She was a suffragist — believe me,” Garman said.

Getting around

Sherman was a keen observer of the town’s various modes of transportation and their evolution over time. The trolleys operated by the Newport and Fall River Street Railway came first, from 1888 through 1925. 

“The electric rails join today a little north of Schoolhouse Lane,” she noted on April 27, 1898. The first “electric car” passed through town on June 18 of that year, and six days later she took her first ride on it to Newport, she wrote.

In 1903, Sherman started writing diary entries in poetry form. “A man got onto the electric track. The car came along and hit him whack. The man of whiskey was carrying a load. And he couldn’t seem to keep to the road,” she wrote on Jan. 17.

“It wasn’t very good poetry,” Garman noted dryly.

Within nine years, however, cars had become all the rage. “Road filed with automobiles and every other kind of vehicle,” Sherman duly noted on June 16, 1907. 

“The invention of the car was a very dramatic development around here,” said Garman, adding that small buses known as jitneys and other buses also became popular.

“Circus in Fall River — I went with Ellen (Arthur’s wife) and Kathryn (her daughter) … I rode for the first time in a jitney,” Sherman wrote on June 14, 1915. By 1925, buses had replaced trolleys as a means of public transportation, Garman said.

As far back as 1917, apparently, local residents welcomed improvements to East Main Road, as Sherman noted that the route was resurfaced that October. (Coincidentally, state transportation crews had just begun long-promised work on East Main the night before Garman’s lecture.)

Coal mines

Sherman’s diaries also remind us that Portsmouth used to be a coal mining town, from 1808 to about 1914. Even after the mines stopped operating, they could still make news.

“The coal mine buildings burned today. Those on the Northern portion of the mines. Some offices and the big red building,” Sherman wrote on March 23, 1920 of the mines, which were concentrated in the Arnold’s Point area. The former Kaiser Aluminum plant was later built on the site of the coaling station, where the Carnegie Abbey tower now sits.

The coal mines were also the site of a family tragedy in 1904. Sherman’s entry from March 25 illustrated just how blunt and matter-of-fact she could be in her writing, even when it came to sharing bad news about loved ones. “Bennie’s dead — killed by a falling plank at coaling station,” she wrote about her 19-year-old son, Benjamin, summing up his demise in just 10 words.  

Eighteen years later, on Nov. 26, 1922, she shared news of the passing of her longtime husband, at 81: “B.C. Sherman dies.” Noted Garman, “That’s all she has to say about it.”

Brrrr — it was cold!

Although hardly scientific proof of climate change, Sherman's diaries still make a compelling case that New England winters were much colder a century ago. When a coal shortage hit the area in 1918 (the local mines had produced anthracite coal, which was used for industrial-grade furnaces rather than home heating), the town was not spared.

“Every Monday is to be a holiday from now until March 25 — no school no business and everything at a standstill,” Sherman wrote on Jan. 17, 1918. Eleven days later, she lamented, “This is a heatless meatless holiday one of many to come — coal famine growing worse and worse,” and noted on Feb. 5 that the temperature was 15 degrees below zero. “Great suffering for lack of fuel,” she said.

On Jan. 18, 1904, she mentioned that the “boys had skated to Gould Island” between Portsmouth and Tiverton, and that there were iceboats in the Sakonnet River.

You have the Blizzard of 1978? Sherman will raise you the winter of 1920.

“The drifts on West Main Road are melting away fast. Some of them were 17 feet high and many of them were 12. This will be a long-remembered winter,” she wrote on March 5, 1920. (1917 was pretty brutal as well — “14 below 0” on Dec. 30, she noted.

Movies and the Klan

Sherman appeared to be somewhat of a movie buff. On her 67th birthday in 1915, she went to the Opera House in Newport to see “Deep Purple” — not the rock band, but a silent film directed by James Young that’s now considered lost. In 1930 she saw her first talkie — “We were not so favorably impressed,” she noted — and then a Greta Garbo film (most likely “Anna Christie”) in the space of a couple of weeks.

On Sept. 10, 1915, she traveled to Fall River to see D.W. Griffith’s massively successful yet controversial rewrite of history, “Birth of a Nation,” which depicts the Klu Klux Klan as national heroes. Considered a landmark in cinema history for its influence and technical virtuosity, it’s now known as one of the most racist pieces of art ever created. Sherman recorded no opinion of the film.

Speaking of the Klan, they were here in Portsmouth. “Last night the ‘Fiery Cross’ was burned on the hill on Cory land by the Klan. There were about 200 at the meeting,” she recorded on May 26, 1924.

Two weeks before the meeting, Sherman made note of a stash of illegal hooch that was found in Portsmouth. (This was four years into Prohibition, which lasted until 1933.) “Captured a lot of liquor at Borden Sisson’s place and another lot at Howard Thurston’s farm which is an ideal place to hide it,” she commented on May 12, 1924.

By 1931 and 1932, Sherman’s excellent penmanship began to fail her and her diary entries became fewer and far between. She passed away on Dec. 10, 1933 at the age of 86.